Will Your Website Survive the Upcoming Google Mobile Penalty?

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You are standing in a booth. People are lined up, handing you money in exchange for a small book. This lasts, with little let up, for most of the day. At sundown, you tuck your money in a backpack and head home.

This has been your life for the last two years. Business has been good, so there was no reason to suspect anything would be different the next day.

Except there was.

You show up to your little booth, and wait. Occasionally, a customer trickles in, but otherwise you are alone. Around lunchtime, you peer down the lane. A few stalls seem to have a steady stream of customers. But not many.

You look at the calendar. It is April 21, 2015. You scratch your head and wonder if tomorrow is going to be same.

An odd warning about mobile search

The story above is analogous to how Google’s algorithm updates typically unfold. Website and small business owners wake up one day to find the landscape drastically changed.

Panda and Penguin are the usual examples we like to trot out. In those cases, however, those who were caught up in the convulsions deserved their punishments. It was clear they were violating — at least, pushing the limits of — what Google favored.

But Google’s update to their mobile algorithm is different. We actually got an explicit warning that a change to the algorithm was coming.

This was posted on February 26, 2015:

Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.

That date is important, but so is the word in bold.

My dictionary defines “significant” as “important; of consequence.” It’s the kind of thing you hear from a dead-serious parent.

In plain English: You better pay attention.

This update should surprise no one

The concern for mobile-friendliness is not a new direction for Google. As far back as 2011, they were declaring, based on the growing number mobile users, the Zero Moment of Truth.

Since then, those mobile numbers have only increased, as I reported in an early 2015 article on adaptive content. And others are validating what we already know to be true.

According to Mitul Gandhi of seoClarity, 30 percent of total traffic comes from mobile, regardless of industry.

mobilevsdesktop

For some of us, it’s more than half of all search traffic … and growing by the moment.

Another clear warning from Google about mobile-friendly sites

But that wasn’t all.

In November 2014, Google announced its intentions to help users find more mobile-friendly sites. How? By adding a label to mobile-friendly sites in search engine results pages.

Here’s an example:

mobile-friendly-search

The user now has a choice. They can avoid the sites that aren’t labeled as “Mobile-friendly,” driving more traffic to the sites that are. In this case, Google wasn’t affecting rankings with this move. Just clickthroughs.

But with the update to their mobile algorithm, it seems they are going to change the ranking landscape.

Google went on to explain in that announcement, “A page is eligible for the ‘Mobile-friendly’ label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot.”